I arrived in New Orleans’s muggy dawn haze to see a team of men spraying last night’s vomit into the chunky gutters of Bourbon Street. Mucus water rushed down the drains like my romantic hopes for the city, leaving behind a beery stench and your troubled narrator, puzzled over where to begin. Following the example of so many before, I trudged into the first bar I saw. Two dim college boys sat knee deep against the bar, no doubt unaware that the sun had risen without them. “Your problem,” the smaller was saying, “is that you’re in love with an ideal, but none of the girls you’ve met have ideals.”

I was disgusted. I could relate. I’d been on a frenetic search for an ideal of my own, you see, setting out on a road trip—that loathsome quest so many embark upon. My travels started in the perpetual doldrums of the Corn Palace in South Dakota, Fisherman’s Wharf for reasons that still escape me, and then Venice Beach. If I ever needed a place to go die, I’d return to Venice.

There was a secret desire behind this endless trip. The first time I imagined I’d found my quarry, that which would satiate this desire, was on the Navajo Reservation in Utah–after attempting to skirt the entire state due to a possibly irrational fear of Mormonism. Bewildered by the Martian landscape, I purchased the best eggrolls I have ever eaten at a rundown gas station. I mentioned the foul needs of my journey to the eggroll vendor: a meaty Navajo woman whose eyes rested on the bathroom door. After many pointed questions from the silver tongue of yours truly, she told me in scarce whispers of Diné beliefs about the soul. Alas, my ignorant mention of skin-walkers—that well dusted Navajo bogeyman—kicked our conversation aside and I lost not only the possible solution to my predicament but, maybe worse, access to those divine eggrolls.

I tarried south then, to the crystal shops of Sedona and Taos, where new age Wiccans talked to leathery hippies about white light and yoni eggs, turquoise and veganism. But my hunt was for something darker, something that couldn’t be fixed by rose quartz or broccoli nestled between heavenly grains. The kombucha wasn’t for me, and I moved on.

Summer waned in a truck stop called the Hitch’n’ Post, somewhere in the middle of a thousand miles of corn. Before I knew it Massachusetts bared its suppressed teeth at my oncoming sedan: the stinking rot of Puritanism a mold maybe dark enough to hold answers. But Boston brought nothing but gravestones, the continued battering of the lower class on one side of a river while universities leeched off the profits on the other. But this is all history anyway, my humble means by which to say I’d searched, toiled for the arcane whispers that might end my journey.

And so New Orleans opened its maw. The wretched frat boys in the bar wouldn’t give up, so I left them to their conversation after my first Sazerac. Following a short nap in the room I was letting, I set off again, abandoning the French Quarter entirely (it was clear where all the hurricane relief efforts had really gone).

---

Queries during a graveyard tour sent me up past years worth of trolley construction to an occult shop on St. Claude, where the denizens of that slow decay of a city parked their cars right on the medians on debauched Friday nights. The shop was nothing this restless wanderer hadn’t seen a thousand times: wormwood, sage, and rosebuds in jars on a shelf, any of an endless train of books on astrology or tarot. Pendants and candles. Maybe a black cat. The Vodou dolls were convincing, but the shop was abandoned and I trudged back into the colorful streets.

A man crusty as an elbow scab approached. I appraised the wormy knuckles of his wagging finger, blue tattoos fading by the minute—one of those countless buskers and railway folk taking solace in this crown jewel of the Caribbean, never questioning whether the crown was another piece of costume jewelry on a Mardi Gras float. He grabbed my shoulder. “I know you. Got a bad case.”

I was caught in the gaze. “Excuse me?”

“Wanna come t’ a party?”

What sort of party could this be? He let your shaken narrator go. “Evil eye needs to blink’s all I’m sayin’.”

And what did that mean? What evils could he possibly know that I hadn’t encountered for myself? I was no stranger to the crumbling knees of our society, the oozing slits where the truth trickled out.

Or did he know? Could he see? Did this rusty vagabond have a glimpse of that which I hunted? Doubtful. In my internal frenzy of questions, I hadn’t realized he was still talking at me, reaching into his coat, handing me a business card of all things. “…take it Max.”

I took the card, pondering how he’d spied my name, whether it was a coincidence. Had he said ‘man’ perhaps? Or a lucky guess? The man poked me as I turned away. “Party starts at three. AM. Good people.”

He tapped the card and tried to get me to buy a stale beer, one of four he carried in his corduroy jacket. I took the beer and found my way to a coffee shop for Wi-Fi. A rule of thumb, dear reader, about my experience in the Crescent City: the more rundown a place seemed on the outside, the more it was bound to delight once entered. The city had learned to build around its endless tragedies, sidestepping the sinking silt and wading through too many floods, still hopeful. Nicest people your wretched writer ever encountered.

The coffee shop—one of these hopeful sunken hideouts—led me down a wormhole of local lore: stories of pirates, vampires, and skirted over race wars still raging unseen by the common tourist come out to play. A name emerged triumphant on the other side of this vortex. Pa Silas Beaulieu: a man who might solve my infernal plight. My phone call led to an answering machine, and a return buzz an hour later. He could see me at six o’clock, maybe more like six thirty.

---

Pa Silas lived in what I would call a bungalow a bit south of Shell Beach. Too many wind chimes. Orange tropical flowers tangled in a useless fence. Mountains of sea glass stacked against frosty windowpanes. I was drawn to row after row of sinister cairns guarding the property. A gust blew in off the sea and toppled one, the clatter of rocks lost against the chorus of chimes and the bungalow door slamming open.

And there he stood. Pa Silas was tall, in a copper suit with a panther embroidered on its back, slick silk shirt peeking out underneath. He looked like a pastor—very clean man. He spied the toppled cairn and met my gaze, a large silver ring glinting on his beckoning hand.

The walls inside the bungalow were mosaicked with more sea glass, puce grout laced between. He led me to a table where a thick candle and a jar full of peacock feathers rested, two wingback chairs on either end. “You want your future,” he stated, the way he lowered himself into his chair revealing a bad back.

“No.”

“Speak to a departed loved one?”

He must have been a pastor, the way those few words flowed so sonorous from his smiling lips. I shook my head. He raised his arms and lit the candle, plucking a peacock feather and rolling its eye over his arms. “You are seeking something?”

“Of a sort.”

He pointed the feather. “Pa Silas always know by the third guess.”

“I…” how much should I divulge? “I want to make a trade.”

He smacked my fingers with the feather. “Bargains can be struck, but there must be two parties for a barter. Understand?”

“I do.”

Smacked me with the feather again. “Who do you seek? Name him.”

“He goes by many names.”

“Lucifer? Satan perhaps?”

“The one who claims these titles.”

“And what do you provide as offering?”

I pulled a bottle of pomegranate wine from my bag and placed it on the table. Pa Silas nodded, and we haggled over his price as Medium. Then he touched the eye of the peacock feather to my forehead, asking me to chant my request over and over. He brought the feather to the fire. Its eye ignited and the many fronds beneath curled in around its spine like ribs, shriveling away to nothing while not unpleasant smoke plumed from the candle. There was a brief flash as Pa Silas pressed the last of the feather into the flame. “It is done.”

I retrieved the bottle. This had been a test, you see, my way of ferreting out a charlatan. “Keep your fee, sir, but it is not done.”

I, furious, probed Pa Silas on all he knew. Pa Silas was proud. We argued. Through much fuss, he conceded. I asked who could achieve my task. He gave me a name and we parted after a cup of coffee. I felt weary, having gotten my hopes up, and the coffee relieved me of my exasperation. “If you do it,” Pa Silas said, “you won’t like it. Devil’s a trickster.”

“Takes one to know one.”

His laughter followed this cursed seeker away from the bungalow. The sea received the sun. My car received me. I sought the name Pa Silas had given: one Madame Fortunata Z. The first result was a newspaper entry about a convent on the other side of the river that had excommunicated a young nun—Sister Fortunata Celeste—for faking stigmata. The story stirred my imagination, and eased my consternation about the name, which seemed too similar to pseudonyms of crystal bangers I’d encountered in the southwest but was understandable for a Catholic. A prison record followed, something about the illegal burning of remains in Lake Ponchartrain. Nothing for twelve years and then a modest website for a tattoo parlor in the Ninth Ward. I called the tattoo parlor. Whoever answered the phone answered in Spanish. A pause, then a cough. “Madame Fortunata Z?”

I introduced myself and mentioned who put me in touch. “Readings are fifty,” she replied, “Ninety and I’ll throw in a tattoo.”

Her voice tinkled, not as I’d imagined from her online reputation. “Two hundred cash,” your fearful navigator put forward, driving back into the city, “if you can do what I ask.”

“Come late. Ten o’clock? I promise your car will be safe.”

---

Dizzying and heady, the night cloyed as I wandered. I had an unsatisfying supper and rambled through Audubon, feasting on the cavalcade of Roman columns and great magnolias, taking in the extravagances that had reduced areas like the ninth ward to what they were. Spanish moss clumped to branches while strands of fog clung to the manicured glades these people passed off as lawns.

Despite a parking ticket, I had high spirits as I turned my keys in the ignition, facing my infernal quest once more. The prospect of meeting Madame Fortunata Z seemed worth my time regardless of the outcome. The drive was uneventful, ten o’clock altogether too early for the careening circus of drunk drivers on any given weekend in the Big Easy.

I killed my motor outside a low chain link fence. There were tin sheds and a ripening kumquat tree, a double-gauged shotgun house with an unlit neon sign that read ‘Hostile Hostel/Tattered Tattoo.’ A cat’s eyes gleamed and I could hear cocks chortling. Tarps and string lights draped like ticker tape in a yard too large to scope in the dark. A few windows glowed. I erred on the side of safety, and called the number of my doubtful savior. “You’re here,” her voice sparkled, “Okay, open the fence. Do you see a string of chili pepper lights? Follow that to where it ends.”

Led through a capricious maze of landmarks (past the chicken coop, mind my begonias, turn left at the fourth tent), I emerged at a sort of yurt. I announced my arrival and a bit of black silk moved from a window. A hand waved and I hung up. I opened the door and a small grey cat with yellow eyes jumped from a shelf onto my shoulders. “Don’t mind Elmo, I just clipped his claws.”

I removed the cat and looked around. Overturned bouquets hung from the ceilings. Your astounded guide spied several peculiarities: alligator paws, a banana colored python (your guess as to how it and the cats got along is as good as mine), and what was unmistakably a human femur.

Madame Fortunata Z sat on a black yoga ball chair. It seemed out of place in the squalid charm of the yurt. Her desk was buried beneath layers of occult debris. She was probably forty but looked younger. Wide hips and earthy clothes. A large tattoo of what I later learned was Chartres Cathedral lurked on her left bicep, a full sleeve on her right of St. George slaying the dragon. Her hair was school bus yellow—a bob and baby bangs—too bright to seem natural but too subtle to ask. She was examining me behind thick, rose tinted glasses.

Reader, if you’re still with me, I was enchanted from the moment I entered. What a woman, what a place for your wretched chronicler to have ended up! If she were to give me what I asked…I offered her my hand. “Madame Fortunata Z?”

“Just Una, please.”

“Max,” I said, too aware of the python as I crossed the yurt, “What do you do here Una?”

I felt a raised portion on her palm as we shook hands. Could the stigmata rumor be true? “Oh, this and that.”

This and that! After serving her sentence, Madame Una bought the property, turning it into something of a wayfarers’ social aid and pleasure club. It served as hostel, campground, and farm (some crops more or less legal than others). Half of the house was partitioned off as tattoo parlor and dorms, the other as event space for burlesque shows and a monthly gathering of what she called church. I suspected the term was a loose one. People and pets of all shapes and sizes had gathered, and Una looked after them as best she could. It seemed arbitrary to ask where the money came from, so I didn’t. Eventually, be still my palpitating heart, we got to the question of my phone call. I began my story and Una, that sweet Madame Z, stopped me. “Why you’re here now,” she said, voice chiming like a batted cat toy, “doesn’t matter. Tell me where it started.”

And how I wanted to! I started with the dream—that dream so many ages ago that I bothered not mention it even to you until now—the dream that would be my undoing. “I was in a yard,” I said, her eyes devouring each word, “with a koi pond, lots of stone work. I guess I tarried from my path. Ended up on a bridge. At first I thought it was a bridge over the pond, but the water stretched forever. More a causeway than a bridge. Anyways, there was a parade of men, naked. Dancing. They twirled toward the edge of the causeway, where a great whale jumped up to swallow each one. Oh it terrified me! And on the other side of the causeway—there was a division where the whale waited—I saw a figure. The loveliest figure. He wore a grey suit. Maybe purple? And over his face, a butterfly! Gray as his suit but for the eyes on its wings, just where his should have been. Those eyes! So green, with pupils like moonlight. He, I think it was a he, was beckoning. It was so vivid, like a movie. Hyper saturated! More real than you or I, and I knew I had to get across the bridge to meet him.”

“But?”

She’d listened! No sign of skepticism in her eyes. Was this to be the moment, the end of my torment? “But I woke up. The thing is, I knew he was the Devil. You know how in dreams you just know things, without reason or rhyme? I knew this.”

“So you want to cross the bridge.”

I nodded. She did the same. “You know I was a Sister?”

I nodded again. “And,” she said, “you know the price of what you ask? You know it was forbidden to even think such things in the convent?”

I shrugged. She grabbed me. “This isn’t a joke. Are you willing to face damnation, willing to barter your soul in the pursuit of a beautiful stranger? Are you willing to jump across that bridge knowing full well the whale will devour you one day anyway?”

The way she spoke! Pa Silas had the conviction of a preacher, but Una spoke with the conviction of belief. I prayed, heaven and hell curse me, that she could pass my test. Abandon me, sneer at the insanity of this story if you must, but Madame Fortunata Z seemed capable of delivering! I stooped like a cat watching its prey, my face a mere inch from hers. “I am willing.”

She exhaled. I retrieved that same bottle of pomegranate wine, adding a ring of silver with a strand of my hair tied around it and a vial of blood, just to be sure. These things required offerings. It seemed less about the ritual itself, more about the intention. She may have even said that to me.

We sat for hours, chanting, lighting candles, drawing sacred circles. She went through so much doubt and smoke and rose petals. I so wanted to believe what she was doing would work. We bared our teeth, pricked our thumbs, shared fluids if you like: two prongs of the same forked tongue whispering one wicked desire. And I almost believed something answered. Almost. She said she had finished and I swear a tear came to my eye. “I really wanted you to be the one,” I said, shaking, “I have sought the end of this useless crusade so long, and you have bewitched me, truly. But you have not succeeded. You may even believe it yourself, but I know. Take your money, just please don’t string me any further along.”

She pulled out a wooden pipe, sucking at it as she searched for a match. Failing, she lit the pipe with one of the many candles we’d ignited and agreed with me. She was a woman of proof, she said, and her proof that she’d achieved what I asked did not weigh up against the certainty with which I believed she hadn’t. She apologized and offered me the pipe as condolence. “Perhaps,” she sighed, “you should abandon this search.”

But of course this cursed beggar couldn’t. I lingered in her presence, seeking comfort in my desolation. It was well past my reckoning when I made my way back through the swaying complex of vegetables and string lights to my car. I pressed my forehead to the windshield and cried. I’m not afraid to admit it. Your wretched and defeated apostle bawled his eyes out, reaching into his pocket to check the time on his phone.

Wait!

What was this? Phone yes, but something else too. A business card! Party starts at three! That’s what the man had said. What time? I fumbled with the passcode on my stupid phone. Just past three o’clock now! How many hours, at this point, had I been up? How many hours have you been with me, patient reader?

I looked the card over. Krewe de Vil, it said, 533 Deslonde St. Any who have traipsed that fragile city, forgive your storyteller, for he did not at that time know the meaning of the word Krewe. Vil was easier; it was French for city right? The address was close enough, and Madame Fortunata had blown my expectations to soot. The sedan lurched away. Horror of horrors, what was I doing? Twelve hours of shuteye was what the doctor would have prescribed for this desperate patient, not the likelihood of being stabbed by river drifters in the dead dull witching hour.

---

My phone threatened to die as I reached the address: a graffiti strewn levee at the crossroads of some useless train track, right on the river. I saw nothing. What was I doing here? Go home, you must be thinking, charge your phone and go back to Fargo you idiot! I’d thought it too, whenever my desperation ended with another disappointing mystic. The Madame Fortunatas of the world, the Pa Silases and the eggroll vendors. Could anybody fulfill my wish? Why did we live in such a cruel and realistic world? What flights of fancy were left to a bored and tired man? What dreams had not already been dreamt and approximated into one more plastic commode or commodity?

Were those bells?

Somewhere down the river I could hear a certain jangling. There were bells, more like a circus calliope. I saw flames then, heard voices shouting and singing. A whole parade rose up in the distance, one of those mythic fêtes only New Orleans could offer. How I cried for beads to be tossed as it pulled up, something I could touch to tell me it was real! People in masks cartwheeled past exorbitant floats teeter-tottering over the train tracks, characters beat drums and raised glasses from gilded decks. A whirling cavalcade of greens and purples and gold gushed past, sweeping your astounded narrator into the fray with wide ejaculations of confetti and clanging bells. People laughed, many of them those same gutter punks I imparted to you earlier, but among them others of every type and make. A man in a suit. A woman with a wide flower crown and absurd taffeta gown. It was a vision, I was sure. There were so many masks. Improbable floats!

I was offered a drink, and then another. Refusing at first, I could not help but imbibe by the third or fourth. I clinked glasses with a woman in a rubber pigeon mask. Somebody whacked me with their scepter. A man with hair like seaweed, nude but for a thick sheen of glitter, blew smoke through a small bubble wand. The bubbles dropped, burdened as they were, and burst into swirling grey nothing. I could smell perfume and tobacco and pot, and behind me—rising on the swell of a light curve in the train track—was the largest float yet: a massive white whale of papier-mâché. Someone had scrawled Mobius Dick in thick red paint on its ribs; its eyes were hazy yellow Edison bulbs. Its blowhole spewed plaster seawater shaped into a throne, where sat an admirable Ahab in grey overcoat, his face obscured by a moon-silver Veronese mask.

If you survived this fever dream, my dazed audience, suffice it to say you were doing better than I. The Ahab pointed a long harpoon at me, throwing it instead into the sky where it betrayed itself as an elaborate firework. I followed the whale, somnambulistic. The parade train warped into circles and dispersed into a party, the whale its fishy centerpiece. Couples skirted towards the river. Many departed. Ahab came to me, mask intact, and pointed to my car. “You got anything to drink?”

We walked towards the sedan. He sank into the passenger seat (not sure I’d left it unlocked) while I fumbled in the trunk. I slid into the driver’s seat and offered him the bottle of pomegranate wine. “Don’t think I’m ever going to find a use for this.”

“This,” said Ahab, uncorking the bottle with a knife and swallowing a heavy mouthful, “is the only use there is.”

He passed me the bottle and your sloshed protagonist spat out his wine as Ahab removed the mask. The man from St. Claude! I was dreaming. There was no other explanation. Ahab slapped my leg, if only to convince me otherwise, his dreads swaying. “Told ya, evil eye needs to blink.”

What could I say? What did that mean? He was laughing. “Did ya really think it’d be that easy Max?”

Was this real then? We drank the wine and watched the water, those evil eddies of the muddy Mississippi. “Can you do it?”

“Trade your soul?”

He had known, when he’d seen me earlier. He took another sip. “Impossible.”

“Why?”

I needed the answer. Please God, don’t let Ahab disappoint me! Let him pass my test. Help us both find our whales. “You’re a shell Max. Got no soul to trade. I could set up the meeting if ya did, but looks like someone already beat me to it, didn’t they?”

At last! I grabbed him, asking the question that would finally seal my quest for good. “How?”

He shrugged his shoulders and finished the wine. I stared into his electric eyes, your astounded narrator struggling, mouth like some useless bottom feeder. “Tell me. Please help me end this. How do I get my soul back?”